Care Services Minister Phil Hope has announced the selection of twenty pilot sites in a study to identify the benefits and issues around Personal Health Budgets (PHBs) and the groups who will most benefit from them. The sites were selected from the seventy PHB Pilot sites put forward by Primary Care Trusts across England earlier this year. Many of these sites will be focusing on mental health along with other conditions whilst some, like East Lancashire Teaching, Lambeth and Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trusts, major on mental health conditions. The three year long evaluation will be undertaken by existing research teams at York and Kent universities as well as Imperial College, London. A number of the evaluation sites include mental health.
PHBs allow a new element of choice and control within the NHS, by giving people direct control of resources, including through Direct Payments. This has necessitated legislative change through the Health Bill, which will allow NHS services to charge for care for those people in receipt of PHBs. The Department of Health in partnership with In Control, has set up an online Learning Network where people can find out more about the pilot programme by clicking here
A range of issues has been raised about PHBs which SPN (which has already undertaken consultations and study days looking at the ins and outs of social care Personal Budgets) will be focusing on in its future work programme. Some of these are financial and budget setting queries, such as how to set up a PHB, who decides who gets what, getting the process more integrated across health and social care (e.g. one bank account for Direct Payment users to avoid a confusing multitude of funding streams), working out prices for services and resource allocation system. Other issues focus on engagement and proper support, such as how to ensure that all groups, including marginalised groups such as black and minority ethnic communities, are included in developing PHBs, what support is needed to ensure the smooth running of family dynamics and advocacy provision and standards.
Here is a link to a document about the range of ‘burning issues’ that were identified at Department of Health learning events held earlier this year
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